Description
Book SynopsisIn Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.
Trade Review"Stuart Schwartz is certainly one of the most important authors of current scholarship about the early modern Iberian world." * Afro-Ásia (Translated from Portuguese) *
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Blood and Boundaries is a dense and stimulating read. One of its many merits is to bridge the gap between historiographies written in different languages and dealing with different geographies, thus fostering a conversation among disparate scholarly traditions, their methods, and problems.” * Journal of Early Modern History *
“This book is an important and welcome addition to the historiography of ideas about racial difference and exclusion in colonial Latin America.” * Hispanic American Historical Review *
“This volume does an excellent job synthesizing a massive amount of scholarship. While the book is accessible to readers of any interest level, scholars will find the copious notes, over sixty pages, invaluable. . . . This work is an immensely valuable contribution that distills hundreds of studies into an accessible and concise treatment that will inform research for decades to come.” * American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsForeword, Introduction, Chapter 1: Moriscos, Chapter 2: Conversos, Chapter 3: Mestizos, Archival Abbreviations, Notes, Index
